Mechanistic Models Fit to ED001 Data on >40,000 Trout Exposed to Dibenzo[A,L]pyrene Indicate Mutations Do Not Drive Increased Tumor Risk.

ED001-study data on increased liver and stomach tumor risks in >40,000 trout fed dibenzo[a,l]pyrene (DBP), one of the most potently mutagenic chemical carcinogens known, provide the greatest low-dose dose-response resolution of any experimentally induced tumor data set to date. Although multistage somatic mutation/clonal-expansion cancer theory predicts that genotoxic carcinogens increase tumor risk in linear no-threshold proportion to dose at low doses, ED001 tumor data curiously exhibit substantial low-dose nonlinearity. To explore the role that nongenotoxic mechanisms may have played to yield such nonlinearity, the liver and stomach tumor data sets were each fit by two models that each assume a genotoxic and a nongenotoxic pathway to increased tumor risk: the stochastic 2-stage (MVK) cancer model, and a model implementing the more recent dysregulated adaptive hyperplasia (DAH) theory of tumorigenesis. MVK and DAH fits to the data sets were each excellent, but unexpectedly each MVK fit implies that DBP acts to increase tumor risk by entirely non-mutagenic mechanisms. Given that DBP is such a potent mutagen, the MVK-model fits obtained appear to be biologically implausible, whereas the DAH-model fits reflect that model's assumption that chemical-induced tumorigenesis typically is driven by elevated repair-cell populations rather than mutations per se.